Geological clues suggest that the space rock that created Chicxulub crater was a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite.
Around 66 million years ago, an asteroid slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula and triggered the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs. Now, researchers have determined that the space rock came from our outer solar system.An asteroid more than six miles wide slammed into prehistoric Central America, kicking off a global heat pulse and years of winter that wiped out more than 60 percent of known species.
Just like iridium, ruthenium is a metal that’s rare in Earth’s crust but is often found in meteorites and asteroids. The extinction boundary rocks have elevated ruthenium levels. What makes ruthenium key, however, is that levels of isotopes, or different versions of the element, vary between meteorites from different parts of our solar system.
The ruthenium signature left behind by the Chicxulub asteroid differed from those of several other impact craters included in the study. The other samples, between a range of 36 and 470 million years old, were most consistent with S-type asteroids that formed in the inner part of the solar system. “That’s an amazing discovery,” Desch notes, as the data narrows down where other meteorites that have left their mark on the Earth originated.
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